Since the merchandise life decreases recently due to increase in the variety of merchandise items, or the number of consumers with customization service orientation increases along with the widespread use of the Internet, the necessity of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and one-to-one marketing has received a great deal of attention. These methods are very effective for purposes of increasing the customer satisfaction and winning and networking new customers.
The one-to-one marketing is a kind of database marketing. Personal attribute information such as age, sex, hobby, taste, and purchase log of each customer is stored as a database. The contents of the information are analyzed, and a proposal that meets customer's needs is presented. A typical method is variable print. Especially, along with the recent progress in DTP (DeskTop Publishing) technology and the spread of digital printers, variable print systems have been developed to output customized documents for each customer. It is then required to optimally lay out contents in different quantities for respective customers.
When such a customized document is to be created by a variable print system, containers are laid out in the document. A container is an object which indicates a rectangular partial area (sometimes called a field area) to draw a content (drawing content) in a database. According to the variable print system, after such containers are laid out in a document, the database and containers are associated with each other (each content in the database is associated with each container). With this operation, a customized document (document) can be created.
However, in the variable print system, text and image containers have fixed sizes. For this reason, when data of each content in the database is inserted in the container, and the data size is larger than the container size, text overlap or image clipping occurs. If the data size is smaller than the container size, a space is formed in the container.
To solve this problem, a system which dynamically changes the container layout in accordance with contents has been proposed. Since the container size is determined in accordance with the contents data amount of an inserted text or image, the above-described problem of overflow or space formation can be solved.
More specifically, a flexible container size is used such that the container size is increased in accordance with the amount of inserted contents data. For text data, the font size in a container is made flexible such that the font size is reduced in accordance with the amount of inserted data. Even when a text with a data size larger than the container size is inserted, the whole text data can be displayed in the container.
A layout system which partially implements the above-described technique is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-129658. In the technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-129658, characters are input in a predetermined container. If characters exceeding the preset container size are input, the container size is increased accordingly. To compensate for the increase in container size, the size of an adjacent container is reduced.
In this layout system, a container is enlarged in accordance with the increase in the amount of text data input to the container. The size of an adjacent container decreases in accordance with the increase in container size. In the layout system, however, the container in which the text is input is continuously enlarged as long as the input continues. The adjacent container continuously reduces its size. Hence, no balanced layout can be implemented. Additionally, the above-described layout system does not assume variable print so inserting contents in respective containers is not taken into consideration.
There is a layout method considering variable data print, in which a fixed container is created, and contents data is inserted. However, when a container with a fixed size is used, and contents data exceeding the container size is inserted, overflow occurs. If the data is forcibly inserted by reducing the font size, the font may be too small.
As a layout method to solve the above problems, the size balance between a plurality of flexible containers associated with each other may be taken into consideration. The size of each container is changed in accordance with the size of contents data inserted. In addition, the change in the size of the associated containers are adjusted. With this layout processing, a layout result considering the size balance between containers can be obtained.
However, in the above-described layout method of adjusting the change amount of each container size, the layout of containers is automatically determined in accordance with insertion of contents data. Hence, the result of layout change can be confirmed only after the end of layout processing.
The user recognizes creation of an undesired layout only when the layout result is displayed. Correction of the layout must be done while confirming the association and sizes of the containers on a preset container setting window. To confirm the change from the initial container setting window, the preview window after the layout change and the container setting window used for initial setting must alternately be displayed and compared. This requires much time and effort for layout correction.